681 Tree Evaluation Project
The motivation for this study lies in previous research on ARCTREES which were developed to depict relational information in tree structures. A one-dimensional Treemap layout was developed for the visualization since it uses limited screen space. The basic layout algorithm is similar to the Treemap. Nodes are nested inside their parent nodes. The algorithm is recursive but does not change partitioning orientation, partitioning is always performed with horizontal splits. This leads to a layout that can be read from left to right and top to bottom (through the nesting) similar to the reading direction for traditional node-link diagrams.
The main purpose of the study was to see how readable the ArcTrees tree layout was compared to the screen-filling original TreeMap layout. From there the next step would be to see how well users understand the reading of relations in ArcTrees. This was, however, not tested in this study.
